Validate your Young People!
In one of the best-selling self-help books of all time, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote,
You can be anything you want to be, if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.
Lead singer of the band Queen, Freddie Mercury, in the song Innuendo sings,
You can be anything you want to be, just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be.
These statements of unlimited potential for each individual come with a dramatic choice for our young people today. Their identity is tied to this incredibly weighty decision. The options are endless if you can achieve whatever your mind can conceive and believe. You just have to believe harder or work harder or do more to get there. Parents back off when teens ask for help discerning for fear of being the “bad” parent that limits their child. Teachers and mentors often offer the same kind of advice as these two cultural leaders have already stated.
Our young adults are struggling more than ever with stress, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that
In 2019, nearly a billion people – including 14% of the world’s adolescents – were living with a mental disorder.
In the same article WHO reports that
Anxiety and Depression went up by more than 25% in the first year of the pandemic alone.
If you are one of these people and do not yet have the help, I would encourage you to get some help today. Online therapy like BetterHelp can be very important to your mental health. There are also many amazing medical professionals working tirelessly to help support the growing demand.
There is hope for our young people. And there is a way to support the young people in your lives. You do matter.
Validation
“You can be anything you want to be” speaks to a future person. This doesn’t speak to the current person. Instead of approaching young people with these huge life-altering questions like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” ask currently relevant questions. “What do you enjoy doing with your free time?” or “What do you do when you are out with friends?” and then validate those things. An unconditional approach can allow you into a more meaningful relationship with these young people. This can lead to, when it is appropriate, these young people inviting you in for specific situational advice and depending on you for it. An unconditional approach also means you need to validate them as a person.
What if you don’t approve of their activities or their lifestyle? The question turns back to you, what investment are you looking to have in their life? If it is just to say your concerns or judgments then that is all you will get. I don’t recommend this in any way but if you do you will only push them away, be completely disregarded except for the hurt they will feel and they will never want anything to do with you again. If you are looking for a lifetime of relationship with this person there is a more difficult yet meaningful approach.
When Jesus came, people called him a
glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” (Matthew 11:19)
These comments imply that Jesus sat with the tax collectors and sinners. He was their friend. Jesus also never sinned so we know he didn’t do all the things of this crowd of people. He was with them and he cared about them. Validation isn’t about doing the same things as the one you are validating, but it is about being their friend and cherishing them. According to Human Performance Resources,
Validation is a response that shows you accept and respect another person’s feelings and point of view, even when you don’t agree with them. It means answering in a way that shows the other person you believe their experience or statement is valid, and you don’t intend to change their view or correct them for being ‘wrong.’
They go on to say,
An empathetic, nonjudgmental response can reduce how often and how severe conflict is when it surfaces, which can help you improve your relationships. People who use validation in their relationships feel more supported, more satisfied, and less stressed. On the other hand, responses that are dismissive, defensive, or rejecting tend to escalate arguments and lead to misunderstandings, and they can make you or the other person feel unimportant, angry, or ignored.
Validation requires your Ego to be set aside
Ego is described as a person's self-esteem or more clearly a person's self-importance. It is responsible for your sense of identity. Your inherent criticism, self-defensiveness, self-imposition of your beliefs and values, and your eagerness to evangelize others to your worldview all need to be set aside to allow for validation to occur. This is for a time only. As relationships grow these components of each other can slowly and carefully be invited in and sometimes even welcomed in. Compassionate criticism is essentially for growth, your beliefs and values can be very helpful as young people establish their own. But to start more than likely you have no voice in their lives where these things are beneficial.
Think of how Jesus relates to these three parties; the Sinners, the Pharisees, and the Disciples. To the Sinners, he heals them, sits with them, and eats with them, and when they respond to him he invites them to follow him. Once they choose to follow them, as in the disciples he challenges them to change their way of living and thinking. Even to the point of being able to say to Peter’s face,
Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns. (Matthew 16:23)
And to the Pharisees who profess to be leading people to God but are not, he challenges them even harder.
You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. (Matthew 12:34-36)
I was going to skip the Pharisees but it is interesting how Jesus reminds us that we will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word we speak. An empty word is
a word that has only a grammatical function, and no meaning in itself.
It can often be associated with loud and confusing talk that has no relevance to the hearer even if it has passion behind it from the speaker.
Jesus shows us these stages of relationship. The sinner or the pre-follower, the follower in the disciples, and the post-follower in the Pharisees. In the same way, we have an influence on our young people. Young adults are looking for good people to follow. Which stage are you with these young adults? If you are a parent, take caution, your young person starts in the follower stage with you as your disciple. But all too often the power of leading is seen as corrupt and in families can move young people's view of their parents from worthy to follow, to no longer following. Your young people move from follower to post-follower and the way Jesus treats the Pharisees is the way you may now feel you are being treated. It is hard to get that back but it can be done through Egoless humility. And to invite young people into our life also takes egoless humility.
Our young people, now more than ever, need to be unconditionally loved and validated for who they are, not who they could be. By validating who they are, you may be allowed into their lives and then be invited to help them define who they are going to be. And who you are, in a small way, may become a part of who they are, and who they are will become a part of you.
Validating our young people will change the world for good.
